will find the old men still at their toil, the same
implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often as
I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads
over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on
the sands.

"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had
strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay
against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their
toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the
sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots
woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props.
Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors'
caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had
never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed
superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by
them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea."

This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl is
touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet.
Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is
a terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and
hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes--despair made flesh. How
long has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers
and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before us
the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and
maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old
men. The shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now as
then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures.

A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not far
from here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after the
fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he
piped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now I
let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy,
and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of
Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its
civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the
campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens,
the boyish boasting, the young,